The Future of Belonging

The paradox of the beautiful city

You would not, on paper, feel alone in Barcelona. And yet.

“Barcelona is generous,” Luigi says. “The light of the sea. The terraces. The late dinners. It’s an easy city to enjoy. Easy to be busy. Easy to meet people. What’s much harder is meeting someone who quietly changes your direction.”

For Tasha it is neither abstract nor evenly spread. “Loneliness has never been louder, especially for younger people,” she says. “So, we go local, first and always. We connect the next generation to each other, to new opportunities, to a city that hasn’t quite become theirs yet. You arrive a stranger. You shouldn’t have to stay one.”

The gap is not a shortage of things to do. “This is a city of movement,” Luigi says. “People arrive. People leave. You can spend months surrounded by fascinating people and still feel as though you’re moving across the surface of the city rather than becoming part of it. Company is easy to find. The rarer thing is an encounter that expands your world.”

That is the real question behind how to meet people in Barcelona, or how to make friends in a new city. Not access. Depth.

Why membership, and why now

Can belonging really be something you buy a membership for? Neither of them flinches.

Luigi watched the answer form over nearly four years in Poblenou, before membership had a name. “There was a community in this building that nobody had named,” he says. “People working here. Hotel guests. Students. Neighbours who came for coffee. What struck me wasn’t what was happening. It was what wasn’t. People shared the same spaces for months who would have transformed one another’s work or friendships if they’d simply been introduced. The building had gathered remarkable people under one roof and stopped just short of introducing them. It was about time we changed that.”

Membership is the intention to close that distance. It also raises the spectre of exclusivity. Both push back hard.

“Exclusivity usually begins with scarcity,” Luigi says. “We begin somewhere else. The building stays open; people come for coffee, to work, to meet someone, to sleep. Membership begins later, when someone decides they no longer want a transactional relationship with the place. Not to use it, but to help shape it. It stops being: are you impressive enough to join? It becomes: what might this place become because you’re here?”

For Tasha, this is where the model gets interesting. “We’re here to disrupt what membership means,” she says. “Real community, real connection, high-end spaces, memorable experiences, and none of the ego. There’s no elitism in our club. It’s about bringing people together around what they care about, not what they do for a living.”

What the room is actually for

Ask Luigi what an ordinary week looks like and the answer is quieter than you might expect. “An early swim at Bogatell or the pool before the city gets hot,” he says. “Breakfast after the market opens. A morning working that turns into lunch with someone you hadn’t planned to meet. An evening on a rooftop while the light changes over the old factory chimneys. And the things that never appear on a programme: running into the same people until plans stop needing to be organised. They simply happen.”

The programming is the engine, and Tasha treats it as central. “Events are one of the most important parts, because that’s how we create so many of our connection moments,” she says. There is the Curiosity Series, built around learning and entrepreneurship, from founder stories to a new skill on a Tuesday night; music running through everything; health and wellbeing, from saunas and recovery rooms to gym floors with DJs and run clubs out into the neighbourhood; arts and culture; food and drink. “Really, it’s a place to let loose and be yourself. There is always something going on at The Social Hub.”

Luigi reaches for the streets outside. “Hundreds of people run together along Bogatell every morning. It isn’t really about running. It’s about returning. The same faces. The same ritual. Small conversations that slowly become friendships. Our experiences work in much the same way.”

Rooted, not parachuted in

Both resist the idea of a members’ space as a sealed bubble.

“Belonging is always local,” Luigi says. “You can’t copy it from Amsterdam to Barcelona or Barcelona to Florence. Poblenou was once the Catalan Manchester, all brick factories and textile mills. Those same warehouses now hold artists, ceramicists, architects, designers, independent publishers and young companies building from scratch. We are not parachuting a private club into the middle of that. We try to add to the life of the place, not wall ourselves off from it.”

This is where Tasha’s social infrastructure becomes concrete, in a programme called Dear Neighbor. “No one hands you social infrastructure. You build it,” she says. “Through the programme. Through the way a space is designed. Through open, public parks, like the big ones we have in Rome and Florence Belfiore. And through Dear Neighbour, which is us saying the quiet part out loud: a membership doesn’t make anyone unwelcome. The opposite. If you live nearby, you’re invited in every Sunday for a coffee on us. Every quarter we ask the neighbours what they need, then show up for it, a beach clean in Barcelona, a park in Rome.”

The values are not incidental. The Social Hub is a certified B Corp, and the point is to make membership something that adds to a neighbourhood rather than fencing off a corner of it.

The future part

The proof tends to be specific. Luigi keeps returning to one member. “Luca Hugo,” he says. “Through relationships built here, and our partnership with the Gran Teatre del Liceu, he ended up designing for the premiere of Madama Butterfly, stepping into opera scenography for the first time. When I watched the premiere, I wasn’t thinking about membership. I was watching someone who walked through our doors for one reason and found himself making something he never imagined. The right people met at the right moment. Luca called it magical, and I think that’s the right word.”

That, for Luigi, is the measure. “The point where I know we’ve succeeded isn’t that attendance has grown. It’s that authorship has. People stop waiting for us to make everything and start making things themselves. A dinner. An exhibition. A collaboration. A business. A performance. Something none of us could have planned.”

Tasha lands on the distinction the whole project rests on. “We talk about HI as much as AI,” she says. “Human intelligence. Human interaction. AI matters, we use it, we’re not against it. But it will never replace a real hello. Mostly what people are missing is just the nerve, and the excuse, to say hi. So, we build the excuse, right down to where the seats go and how wide the corridors are. We use data, yes, AI, to nudge the introductions that happen in person: a study partner, a gym buddy, someone who speaks your language because you landed last week. That’s one of the features of the Membership app that we are launching.”

Membership is launched in Barcelona, Rome and Florence, the company’s biggest step so far, with Amsterdam and Glasgow to follow shortly, the latter a first of its kind for the city. Tasha talks about becoming the biggest disruptor of the members’ club model, at scale, across a growing European network. “It’s time for a new kind of members’ club,” she says. “One built on connection and human intelligence, not status, not ego.”

It is fully evening now. Whatever was still work has quietly given up. Someone laughs too loudly at the far end and nobody minds. Earlier, I had asked Luigi what he says to someone who has been coming in for months but never taken the step. He barely paused. “I don’t try to convince anyone. The moment it feels like a sale, you’ve lost the thing you’re talking about. I just describe what’s already happening. You’re here three times a week. You know people by name. You don’t sell someone belonging. You help them notice they’re already inside it.”